BASIC INFORMATION
Short name: STRATUM
Long name: STiRr lArge neTworks and User Management STRATUM
Company: Level7
Country: Italy
Call Stage 1: F4Fp-SME-COD210330 (see call details)
Proposal number: F4Fp-SME-COD210330-02
SUMMARY REMARKS & TESTBEDS
The STRATUM experiment is based on new markets that are rapidly growing thanks to the use of SDN and SD-WAN technologies for those customers who need to connect remotely to offices. Before the advent of the SDN and SD-Wan technologies, the most lucrative market was dominated by MPLS circuits that were complex to build and often not always as stable as other services due to their complexity in the delivery process as well as in the operational day-by-day monitoring.
The cost for those services is still very high and the implementation time is of months instead of minutes or hours. However, the MPLS architecture provided high security levels, thanks to network isolation, needed by very large companies that were not scared by the high cost of the MPLS circuit. The SD-WAN technologies promised to solve many of the limitations from the MPLS world and at the same time are becoming more accessible to small and medium operators, thanks to many efforts in the SDN/SD-WAN arena from the open-source community.
Today, after the last covid pandemic wave, the need has been evolved: kids are forced to stay at home instead of at school and more and more companies (even small ones) are now thinking of a future with virtual offices scenarios where the employees could have more flexibility of choosing when staying at home and when a physical presence is needed. Therefore, the main concept beyond the STRATUM project is to start shaping new networking services thanks to devices that are based on SDN and SD-WAN, and tested on the Fed4FIRE+ platform which is intrinsically distributed, in order to test the multiple scenarios of connecting terminals and networks in an overlay fashion.
